As of August 22, the JHU Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling received funding to develop a resource for storing and sharing cardiac electrophysiological experiment protocols and results. Examples of these experiments include patch clamp, voltage clamp, and fluorescence imaging.
The JHU team is working in conjunction with an international consortium of experimental electrophysiologists, proposing reporting standards for the Minimum Information about a Cardiac Electrophysiology Experiment (MICEE). The proposal incorporates the use of a standardized form, to capture information routinely left out of methods sections in the interest of saving space. Through the standardized form, this information would be deposited in the repository, allowing readers wanting to understand the complete details of an experiment to be able to do so. Having such a repository would aid investigators in attempting to replicate experiments and in understanding why experiments focusing on the same problem may work out differently in different labs. This proposal has been published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal, with the abstract and other information available via Pubmed (PMC21745496). This proposal will also be presented at the next HEART group meeting at the AHA Scientific Sessions 2011, to be held November 12-16, 2011 in Orlando, FL.